What’s New

Hey, guess what? The Drunken Botanist is officially available for pre-order. Here are a bunch of ways you can do it:
Ask your local independent bookstore to order a copy for you.
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble.
Pre-order at Amazon.
Stop by this page in February and pre-order a signed copy from me. (Sorry, we can’t take pre-orders for signed copies this far in advance, but we’ll be up and running in...

Ebooks rarely go on sale, but this month two of mine are available through special promotions:
For the month of November only, pick up Flower Confidential for $1.99 as an ebook at Apple, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, Kobo, Google, and Amazon.
Wicked Bugs is also available this month only at Amazon for $2.99.
And remember, you don’t need a dedicated ebook reader to read them–you can download them to your laptop, tablet, desktop computer, or smartphone as well....

Hey, if you’re in the area, stop in and see me at the Howard County Library. I’ll be talking about Wicked Bugs and Wicked Plants, and they’d like you to register in advance here.
I’m also headed to Longwood Gardens, but they tell me that one’s sold out. There is a waiting list–if you want to get on it, give that a try here.
And after I get back? Some exciting early news about my next book The Drunken...

This post will only make sense to you if you were in the talk I gave at Tales of the Cocktail called The Drunken Botanist: A Preview. It was a sneak preview of my new book, coming out in March 2013, called The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks. I promised to share links to a bunch of sources, so here they are:
Handbook of Alcoholic Beverages — this new two-volume set covers a wide range of research and technical information that I referenced throughout my talk.
FDA DATABASES:
Poisonous...

Hey, good news! Algonquin Books has picked a whole bunch of garden and nature ebook titles for $1.99 for the entire month of July. The list includes two books from Diana Wells–Lives of Trees and 100 Birds and How They Got Their Names–as well as three lovely escapist narratives: The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Settled in the Wild, and the literary anthology The Writer in the Garden.
And a couple of my books are on the list–you can also get The Earth Moved or From the Ground Up for $1.99.
Remember that you don’t need a...

Hey! Where did all these paintings come from? As I was reorganizing my office, I came across a box–a whole box!–of paintings that I had forgotten I had. Many of them are small, quick plein air paintings I did on-site, sometimes as part of a workshop or other painting excursion. A few are studies for larger paintings–sort of a dress rehearsal for the real thing.
Anyway, I took one look at them and thought, “These must go! Now!”
So I have put them all on eBay with a starting price of $9.99. They’re...

Another chicken portrait! This is Ladybird, our very sweet Buff Orpington. 8 x 10 on a thin art panel. Click here to bid.
And go here to see other paintings on eBay…and here’s my gallery on Daily Paintworks…
I’ll put a larger version of the image...

I had this idea to do a series of people eating their lunch at the New York Public Library. So far, it is a series of two. This is the first one. Maybe tomorrow I’ll show you the second one.
This painting is a minor triumph for me–I’m totally intimidated by the idea of painting bodies. Those bare legs are trickier than they look. But when I took this picture, I was emboldened by the workshop I’d just taken with Karin Jurick, in which she had us walk around the city and photograph people to paint. (She’s...

I am home–drove back from Portland last night–and the first thing I did when I got up this morning? Start a new painting! It’s good to be back in my space, doing my thing.
So expect to see a lot of paintings over the next few weeks. I have a few that were still drying when I left that I’ll post, plus some new ones.
This one is listed on eBay–it’s 5 x 7, oil on 1/2 inch board, with slots in the back so you can just hang it unframed on a nail if you want to. Click here to bid. And go here to see all my...